This podcast comes as a result of so many children that I know that have been getting medicated because they can't sit still in school, because they're defiant, because their parents take them to the doctor and the doctors assume that they need a little pill for their quote-unquote mental health. And I really, I don't think this works. And this podcast is my experience working with many, many children throughout the last 30 years.
Some of them in the criminal defense work that I used to do for, you know, I only do that now part-time, but for 27 years I worked full-time for the Federal Public Defender's Office, where most of my work was doing mitigation.
Mitigation means that you investigate the person who has been accused of a crime, their life, how they grew up, what access they had to education, to good or bad attachment with their family, whether there was drugs in the home, their socioeconomic loss and how that might have affected their choices. Basically, you're humanizing this person in front of the judge who only sees, for the most part, people as numbers. So it's deep work of connection to the clients and really to their families.
And a lot of my clients, by the time they got arrested, they had to be over 18, of course, but they had a history of being on Ritalin or antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications since they were very, very young. This isn't a new thing, right? This has been going on. It's now way more common. Your son, your daughter feels a little sad or they're acting up and you don't know how to deal with your own shit. So you take them to the doctor and they medicate them and then there you go.
Now they're manageable, but then they don't really get better. They don't really get better. They don't really get better because what happens with these medications is that they don't act, they don't, it's like, it's like putting a bandaid on a problem that has a much deeper root. And the root is pain, sorrow, grief, unprocessed emotions, dysregulated nervous systems.
Intergenerational trauma that's been passed down from mother and grandmother and great-grandmother or father and great-grandfather, etc. And there can be such a long list of, situations why this pain might be there. The biggest one is, I believe, to be the attachment, right? How you are connected to your caregiver, the sense of safety and attunement and nervous system regulation that you get since you're in the womb of your mother when you're a little baby.
And for example, one of the first questions we asked in mitigation when we were working with, you know, and by the way, criminal defense crimes that I was, you know, doing the last 10 years have been with cases of murder, right? People that are facing the death penalty. And because of the situation of their life, you know, a lot of them are from El Salvador and had to move here, running away from their homes and went through the whole train immigration.
Intense journey to come to the United States. And then they're here and they feel like they don't belong. And they're at the auntie's house or some uncle's house and they feel like they're a burden and they don't have their parents and next thing you know, they're hanging out with people from El Salvador and who do you belong to if you don't belong to your family?
No one, but guess what? Maybe the gangs are an opportunity where you feel like you're a part of something and so that's why we go into gangs, we go into these dangerous situations. Number one, to belong and number two, because we don't measure and I say we because I grew up with a lot of trauma myself And it's not always what happens to you, but also what didn't happen to you where you grew up.
And growing up at the border in Tijuana during the 80s with all the cartels and all the craziness, if you are listening to this and you grew up with me, you know what's up. You know what happened. Some people got better. Some people died. Some people didn't get better.
And it was intense. And so what happens when you have a background of a dysregulated nervous system, of an issue with attachment, and I'll explain attachment in a little bit, what happens is that you choose high-risk situations as a result of the trauma you've endured. You don't measure, you don't have a, you know, you're not listening to your intuition about something that could be extremely dangerous for you.
You like high-risk activities. You get excited because at least you're feeling something. You're so numbed out from so much disconnection and pain that you find these, you know, these things exciting and exhilarating, and they make you feel, quote-unquote, alive. And so there's many reasons why people might join the gangs, but this is certainly one of them, the high-risk activity. And what does society say? What does your family say? What do the neighbors say? Oh, I can't believe that.
She's with the narco. She's with the gang. She's doing this, she's doing that. Lord have mercy. Nobody ever takes into consideration the culture that the parents or the caregivers probably had something to do with your reacting this way, acting this way, because they're clueless and maybe not Not everybody chooses to go all the way high risk activities, but there's other ways that people are suffering.
So not a us and them situation is just, you know, different walks in this life to get to whatever you came to do for your soul's journey in this lifetime, you know, and everybody has their own journey and their own path. But the medications are part of the problem because they don't allow, I mean, they help in not looking at the part of, for example, if I was, you know, to talk about me, the part of me as a mom that participates in my kid's pain, right?
And if my kid joined a gang or if my kid was doing these type of high-risk activities and all I want to do or they can't get up off the couch because they're completely depressed and all I say is, oh my God, well, let me take you to the doctor and they give you me a pill and then I could just give you the pill and I... Think that we need therapy or family therapy or group therapy or some form of other intervention because, well, the doctor, the little white coat gave me the pill, so that's it.
And, you know, I've worked with people that have been on antidepressants for 25 years and they keep switching to the next one, to another one, because it's not working and to the next one and to the other one. And they've never been able to feel why they even, you know, what they even couldn't deal with and to begin with when this whole depressed grief state started. And so the pills and these medications that we're giving our children and are taking ourselves are okay.
Maybe when you're an adult, if you need to take it because you need to get over a hump or something super difficult while you take care of yourself, doing the work, moving forward until eventually you can get off of them. And there might be extreme cases. I'm not against, you know, I think, well, I mean, they must be good for something if they're here, but they're not a solution for being a human being that has, this is a sentient being that needs to feel things to heal them.
The problem really is that we as a society don't know how to feel. We've been robbed of feeling and sensations for years, thousands of years, ever since these religions came in and separated, you know, nevermind church and state. It's more like body and mind. You can't feel your your body. You can't feel pleasure. You can't scream. You can't cry. You can't do this. You can't do that. I mean, women at even a higher level, because for so many years, we're just property.
In many areas, we still are. And the way you get treated and the way you have absolutely no agency over your body, of course, you're going to disconnect from your body. It's the safest way to not die while you're being eaten alive, basically, which is also a mechanism of the nervous system, you know, to just faint when somebody's about to do something horrible to you, to dissociate, to leave your body.
So the organism of our body is so freaking intelligent and powerful, and it's just mind-blowing that we don't have more information and access to this since we're young. These ought to be like some of the first books we're reading, some of the first things that our parents, whoever's pregnant needs to get educated on. It's how these systems work. They call it ancestral, but it is, of course. Everybody used to do it thousands of years ago.
Always be attached to your baby, carrying the baby until there's one or two years old, nursing that child, sleeping with them. This whole, I'm going to sleep in the crib, I'm going to put the baby in the crib thing is quite new. It's not even possibly over a hundred, even a hundred years old when these pediatricians in the 40s, 50s started to trend up using formula and not nursing your child and allowing
him to sleep on his own alone in a crib by himself. It's, completely dysregulating for a little baby to sleep alone in another room.
Oh yeah, I have a camera. I can see yours, but it's horrible for the child because when you're not, you're not able to at that tiny little age to regulate your nervous system, you need another human to lay there next to you, to help you calm down, to help you know that even though something was scary, that somebody's got your back and that they're there to protect you, to reassure you and validate you of whatever emotion is coming through, instead of telling you to stop crying or go over there,
and once you're ready to stop crying and stop your pity party, that you can come in and be a part of the family. Someone negating your emotions, it's such a, something that we just take for granted. You know, I'll be with some clients and be like, how was your childhood? Well, you know, I got spanked in there, but it wasn't a big deal, really. Well, if I'm spanking a two-year-old in front of you here at the market, what are you going to think?
Oh my God, that would be horrible. Yes, but for you, you think it's not a big deal. And it just goes to show the protective mechanisms that we have in our system that minimize our pain, that minimize it to a degree because we're so, we have this need for attachment, which people call quote unquote loyalty to our caregivers.
And you can still love your caregivers, but understand that they had no fucking idea what they were doing when they were putting you in the crib and letting you cry it out, about, you know, or at school sending you to time out or spanking you or completely. Not present for your emotions as a child, not attuned to your needs. Trauma isn't just what happened to you, but also what didn't happen to you, what you didn't receive, what you did, if you didn't get seen, validated, held.
There's so many things that are happening, especially now that parents are so stressed out, you know, and the first thing we do if your child is not wanting to sit down all day in a desk, which, by the way, these institutions, I don't think, are very helpful. We're not supposed to be sitting in desks all day. We're supposed to be running around and playing and building homes and with wood and, you know, tending the animals and being creative and singing and dancing.
And so we're in these little classrooms because mom and dad have to go work two or three jobs. And here is a kid who can't sit still. And it's an inconvenience for the teacher because she has to deal with 20 other kids, 30 other kids sometimes. So why don't we give your child a little pill so he can focus? Here we go. Amphetamine since 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years old.
What's going to happen down the line when they're 15, 20, 25, and the house has not done any of the work to figure out why you were stressed out with ADHD to begin with. The house didn't start to meditate. Your whole family didn't go to group therapy. The whole family didn't think, well, maybe we need to slow down and lower down this list of expectations, not try to be, you know, competing with everybody else like society wants us to. Can we do our own thing over here?
We be average? Oh, God forbid you have an average child, average family, right? We all want to be the superheroes. And where has that taken us?
And what I saw happen for many, many years is that after so many years of amphetamines, these riddling things, if you haven't done the work, if your family didn't go and teach you how to meditate or teach you or reassess and reevaluate their lifestyle, go in and see, okay, well, maybe there's something we can work here regarding my own trauma, my own family history.
If that doesn't happen and the pain and the stress keeps growing and growing and growing, there's going to come a time where that really isn't going to be enough. You're going to move to meth. You're going to move to alcohol. You're going to move to some type of shoplifting. You're going to move to something else that needs to fill that incredible incredible gap because these medications are like a little crutch and there are very many ways.
Again maybe you know if you're an adult and for a little bit you want to take it, while you do some work you know i have a lot of friends and teachers and mentors that that have done it for a few months here and there and then you do the work and then you get off of them, they tried it fine but a child i mean and you know there's there's things that we just have said in our minds that we can't, that we think we can't change. Like we think we can't change.
You know, I remember I always hated having to take my kids to daycare. I wanted to homeschool. I wanted to be with them. And I had this super incredible, powerful job. And we had a big house and my husband had a big business. And we, I said, why? I don't really want to work anymore. I need to stay with the kids. And he would tell me, well, why don't we downsize? Which if that would be happening right now, I wouldn't even blink and do it.
But 20 years ago, that just wasn't something that was in my consciousness. I just thought, no, we can't downsize. We need to work harder. We need to do something. We need to win the lottery. How are we going to downsize? Of course we could have downsized. Of course I could have sold a big house with a pool and a hot tub and gone to a smaller place with a big yard and network with other homeschooling moms and figured out a way to begin my entrepreneurship journey back then instead of
15 years later. But it's a journey. It's all a journey. I'm just here talking about this because I've seen and heard and learned so much and experienced so much that I have a conviction to just let you know that your child doesn't need to be medicated.
You need to go to therapy as an adult and do some somatic practice this works and maybe sit with the mushrooms and get to the root of what the hell is wrong with your own heart connection so that as you heal and regulate and get calm you will notice the change in your kids. Things that can be moved and wiggled around, even if you still have to be in the hustle of working three jobs a day.
Because there are so many different options and the body is extremely, extremely capable of healing itself and of recognizing when you're looking towards it and going inwards. It has this capacity that we think we don't have. We've given all our power away to the little people in the white coats. That might be very helpful at times, but for the most part, they don't really have that much time. This healthcare system, quote-unquote, is more of a disease management system.
And they have very few minutes to come in, read you from a script, give you a prescription, and move on to the next person, which is horrible. But that's what we're dealing with. And the more we begin to know this and to, and a lot of this is already coming to the light. We already know about this. We have to advocate for ourselves. The doctors work for you. It's not a government agency. It's not like some kingdom where if you don't do what they say, you will be beheaded.
But that's how we act because that's been our history for hundreds and hundreds of years. Fear-based, I'm going to do what the hierarchy person says. And it's not necessary anymore. You can advocate for yourself. You're the one paying the insurance. You're the one paying the doctor. You're the one making the appointments, which means you can question, ask, reassess, reevaluate, get second opinions. There's different formula. There's a UCSD Center for Mindfulness.
In lots of other places and wherever you live that you can find information from regarding other options besides medicating. Medicating, you know, might be a way to appease your own guilt or subconscious decisions about what you're doing because you don't want to look at your own pain. You don't want to look at your own issues. And like I said earlier, we all have issues. We we all have pain. Nadie se salva. Everybody grew up with, you know, in this culture already.
And there's so much beauty. There's so much love. And we're disconnected from it because we don't want to take a look at what is going on. And that is what happens with, you know, kids and caregivers, since this whole attachment system is fucked up to begin with. And it's not just us that we did it to our kids. It got done to us, the grandparents. Some people have way too many many kids. And so the kids are basically raising themselves and, oh, that's fine.
That's how it used to be. But it isn't how it used to be. It used to be that the community would care for our kids or be, you know, multi-generational people always connecting. And somebody was there to hold you on your lap or to look at you and validate you and give you a little bit more sense of a security because it's all a safety issue. And so why are we arguing with our teenagers? Why don't they listen? Why are we arguing with our kids?
And we can't get along and we're screaming at each other. When in reality, in the middle of that, there is so much love. It's ridiculous the amount of love that is felt by or known by a parent that we don't have access to because of the trauma and these dysregulated nervous systems and these adaptations that we think are necessary. We think we need to scream at the kids to make them understand. Who the hell wants to be screamed at to understand?
I mean, the reason to scream would be if someone's in danger, right? Or if you're trying to, or as a regular regulated nervous system way, if you see a snake, you're going to scream because you're scared. But to yell at a child, to get them to, you know, to get it, quote unquote, get it, is completely ridiculous. We're not wired for that type of communication.
And so it's a shutdown, shutdown, shutdown. And I work with so many families and so many kids and so many people that I just see, oh my god there's this deep longing to connect but these barriers of this function this functional adaptations of behavior that just get in the way so we want to connect with our kids but we don't allow it we don't even know we're not allowing it right we just think it's the kid's fault or it's or oh my god is
that friend they're hanging out with oh my goodness is that dumb some school, if I had to put them in the other school, instead of, you know, well, how about, you know, you read a few books on trauma and your body and the body keeps the score and the tiger and, or you go to some type of retreat where you can reassess how you grew up, how disconnected we are from the earth and from our body and how all of this is kind of like this tumbling snowball that keeps growing and growing until
somebody sits there with a fire and begins to melt it away. And it's going to take some time, but it'll work. It'll work. We're programmed and we have this intelligence inside of ourselves to change things around, to slowly heal and feel, and to slowly reconnect to ourselves and then to our children. Robert and Daniel Mate have this really cool, it's like a 10-hour program. You can get it on Commune. I think it's mycommune.com or Commune,
some type of program. I'll put it on the links here after I send the podcast out. But it's how to, you know, they did this whole, I guess it's kind of like a retreat, but it's more of a process where they reconnect as adults, adult children and their parents.
Where you see all the work that they've done and how they help other adult children, reconnect to their parents and the misunderstandings, the stories we make up about ourselves and about our parents and the parents about the kids and about themselves and how really everybody, just what they want is to connect, to forgive, to let go and to be able to start over. So it's never too late. Even if you're 50, 60, 70 years old, it's never too late.
And if you're young, well, even better. You have more time to be able to connect freely, and without having the trauma grips pull you back and not let you love yourself and those that are next to you and understand that our kids don't need to be fixed. There's nothing wrong with them. What's wrong is this toxic culture, and we can participate. You know, it's just like the elections. You can't just go vote and see who's going to win and then, okay, well, I guess we're going to do it.
No, we need to be in the village. We are the ones that are responsible to connect to ourselves, to our families, to our communities, to build these spaces where we can have each other's backs and return to the quote-unquote village ways. And unfortunately, sometimes the school systems are just so saturated that, you know. I have a lot of friends in the education system that are really trying, you know.
Teach self-care and self-regulation to the teachers, to the caregivers, so that then they can teach it to the children. I have friends that are doing unschooling or homeschooling that are very much involved in teaching the children emotional intelligence and connection to the earth. And it's so beautiful to witness. Now, hopefully that's like a new thing that, you know, other, I guess not everybody has the time or the resources to do that. But I do also think that everybody can find a way.
We can all find a way, especially if we come together. But the whole podcast here began because I really think we all need to reassess this popping pills like candy situation. Unless you're completely run out of options and as an adult, you know, you have these choices. But after having tried everything else and getting to the root of the problem.
And one of the things I mean by where the problem is I see a kid get medicated, and everyone thinking okay well that's the solution meanwhile the parents are drinking every day mom's a complete alcoholic has herself been medicated for many many years how is that a solution? That's not a solution that's not a solution that's an avoidance of doing some inner work and asking for help. We don't have any problem asking for a pill, but we have a lot of problems asking for help.
And it's all right to ask for help. And it's becoming more and more common. Maybe it wasn't common a long time ago, but it's much more common now. And so, you know, like I said in this, you know, life isn't a production. Life is an experience. And we've been sold this lie that it's a production that we have to produce, produce, produce.
Check all the boxes in here so that you can make sure you fit in with society, study this and this and this in college so that you can get a good job and make a lot of money and keep consuming, keep consuming, keep consuming. And it's killing us. You know, a better idea might be to downsize, to see, you know, where are we going to be in 40, 50 years with the land and food situation and the water? And what do we want for our children and our grandchildren.
I mean, I'm at an age now where I realize some of the plans that I have for this farm that we're working on is that I probably won't be there for, I'll be there for a while, but most of it is a legacy. It's something that I want for my kids and their kids and other kids in my community and their kids from our community.
And just doing an offering of consciousness, really, to the planet, to our, and the planet's children, who is us, you know, it's me, it's my kids, it's all these little children that are going to these school systems and getting medicated so that they don't need to be an inconvenience, so for the love of the gods and goddesses. Me dice mi amigo Javier, va a ir a terapia. So I'll go to therapy. Therapy, group therapy, and yes, patience because it takes some time.
Practice meditation, practice being outside, whatever you need to do to use your capacity in this human, bright, intelligent body that we have to heal ourselves because it's in there. It's in there. You are your own medicine, and it's completely possible. Possible. The problem is we need to look inwards and we're always, for the most part, looking outwards for somebody else to do it.
But we can do hard things and there's a lot of beautiful work and beautiful healing things happening out there and in here, in our hearts as well. Again, you need help, you need resources, reach out. We have long lists here of places that I can direct you to, or you're welcome to work with me or some of my other colleagues that are doing this type of work of dabbling in the healing arts and somatic practices and returning to the village ways.
May we all be well, and may our children and little kids know that their parents care for them, their caregivers care for them, and that we're trying our best to reconnect and to remember our essence and who we truly are, that we have this power, this capacity to slow down and be well. Thank you for listening to Tales of Recovery. This is your host, Gris Alves.